And I'm and Welcome to Small Bight Sound Bites, a weekly segment of the Food for Thought Podcast in which I share short responses to typical questions, typical myths, and

misconceptions related to living compassionately. Thank you so much for your support of this

podcast. Please help keep it ad free and keep it going by going over to joyful

vegan.com slash donate and becoming a supporter today. Today I want to address an

assertion many of us have made or many of us here pretty frequently and it goes something like this.

What's wrong with drinking cows milk if the cows are treated humanely and live on lovely green pastures.

So I remember the day I learned that cows don't just naturally quote unquote give milk, right?

And I remember feeling really stupid and I know I'm not the only person

who just believed that cows naturally constantly produce milk, right? Of course, like everyone else, I desperately did not want to believe that my consumption of

cow's milk or cheese or butter was harming anyone so I believed the story that cows essentially

just exist to bestow upon humans the gifts of their

memory glands right I mean we don't say they lactate we don't say we take

their milk we say they give milk, cows give milk. We certainly don't talk about the fact that we impregnate

them in order to stimulate the production of that milk.

Now, we have many, many centuries ago

taken cows out of the wild, thousands of years ago,

and we have taken the freedom out of their lives and what we have

replaced that freedom with is a manipulation of their bodies from ovaries to

utter. That is to say cows are not finding themselves wooed by the local bull, who

want to pass on his genes. We've taken that pleasure away from both the cow and the bull and we do the dirty deed ourselves in

order to keep cows lactating to keep their milk production high and to keep the

cows worth keeping alive temporarily, they must be impregnated again and again.

...